What is a Chatbot and why does your business need one?

90% of time spent on mobile is via email or messaging platforms, so brands want to take advantage of this and build more services for the places where consumers are hanging out the most. With Artificial Intelligence technology developing at lightning speed in the last 2 years; the possibilities for delivering amazing customer experience via messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Slack have increased tenfold in the last 12 months alone.

So, what is a Chatbot?

Not to be confused with messenger auto replies that tend to be robotic and isolating to customers, a Chatbot is a program that runs on a messaging tool and is powered by a set of rules like ‘If User asks this answer this’ as well as Artificial Intelligence which learns from the conversations it has over time to become more and more capable of having a useful and emotive conversation.

At Facebook F8 – the annual Facebook conference, many new support features for Chatbot developers were announced and you can see some great Chatbot examples in the video clip from the conference here.

Why is this a big deal now?

One simple reason: for the first time ever, people are using messenger apps more than social networks. Let us explain why this is revolutionary below.Why your business needs a ChatbotChatbot presents brands with a massive business opportunity – because logically, if you want to target the biggest audience for your business – you want to go where the people are. And where are the people today? On the messenger apps. If you consider that from a business perspective and trying to reach your customer; this makes messenger apps the best place to target your customer.

Messenger bots allow for a conversation with customers to take place and gives the online brand portrayal a much-needed human touch. In today’s world this is crucial, as customers are looking for immediate, relevant responses to their questions – something Chatbots can provide. Thanks to Chatbots, you won’t have to worry about losing potential customers or interest in your services, as the messenger bots eliminate the longer response rates that occur naturally when you don’t have a social media manager available every second of the day to reply to messages on your business pages.

How does it work?If you’re thinking that this sounds complex, and you’re already beginning to doubt whether this is feasible to do alone – you’ll be happy to find out that setting up a Chatbot is something you can totally do yourself!First things first – You will need to decide on the following;1. What problem are you going to solve with your bot? Will your bot provide weather updates, information on your businesses opening hours, or help your customers navigate through your company site? 2. Which platform will your bot live on? There are many options to choose from, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord, Telegram and Kik.

3. Set up a server to run your bot from, and then choose which service you will use to build your bot. Here are a few services you can use; wit.ai (bought by Facebook), textit.in and Chatfuel.

Reluctant to build your own Chatbot? Contact the team at Mold and we’ll assist you with setting up your brand’s first Chatbot. You can reach us at hello@mold.agency or tweet us @mold_agency